Easy Mixed Berry Dessert Sauce Recipe
Make this easy sauce when the farmer’s markets are groaning with fresh and local (and usually quite cheap) berries and you’ll enjoy a fantastic sauce for vanilla ice cream and a host of other desserts all winter long!
Making this is very similar to making jam, and jam isn’t all that hard to make, but since you don’t have to worry about it setting at room temperature (it can be runny – the ice cream doesn’t care) this is all but foolproof.
To make this, however, you will have to rely on your taste buds. The amount of sugar you’ll need to add depends entirely on how sweet or tart the berries are that you’re starting with and how sweet you like you berry sauce to end up. If you’re not used to cooking without a recipe, don’t get too stressed about it - this is very easy stuff and since you’re the one that’s going to be eating it all year long, you might as well make it to your taste anyway.
Easy Mixed Berry Dessert Sauce
- 5 or 6 pounds of mixed berries - Berries that work well here include blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, cranberries, red currants and blackberries
- White sugar to taste (generally you want to use between a quarter and a half as much sugar as fruit, by weight) Start off by adding the smaller amount
- A pinch of salt
- A few pinches of citric acid as needed (if you have never cooked with citric acid before, you should definitely get some. Citric acid is often used in jams and it lends a pleasantly sour limey note. It can be useful to add a pinch here and there as you seek out balance in the final seasoning. If you do not have citric acid on hand, then you can omit it
- Dump your fruit into a big pot. Set the pot over medium heat and let it cook for about an hour, stirring occasionally, or until the fruit has transformed from individual berries to a mixture with a jam like consistency.
- Add sugar to the quantity of about a quarter of the weight of fruit. (If you started with 6 pounds of berries, use 1 and ½ pounds of sugar and add in also a couple of small pinches of salt.
- Stir the sugar until dissolved and then taste add more sugar to taste if needed – adding pinches of citric acid along the way for a pleasant sweet/tart taste to the mixture.
- When sweetened to your liking…then you are done! (I like
this quite a bit more tart than jam, so as to counterbalance and add freshness
to the sweetness of the vanilla ice cream I usually eat it with).
You could can this, but I prefer to just let it cool and then pour it into a few manageable sized ziplock bags. I toss these into the freezer and take them out as needed over the course of the year (because of the high sugar content, this will last quite a while in the fridge, so I probably take a bag out of the freezer once a month or so, and keep it in the fridge in the meantime.
- No Canning Lazy Man's Raspberry Jam. 2 Ingredients and So So Good.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jchatoff/592883834/ There is just something so satisfying about a little daily harvest of raspberries. Waking up each morning ready to pluck off the day's ripe berries makes me...